"Something Deeply Hidden" by Sean Carroll (2019)

The book urges---science teaches--to go through life shedding prejudice, seeking a more convenient basis for one's representations, and deconstructing emergent phenomena into their constituent parts. Science (at least on fast forward and with Sean Carroll's voice at 1.25x) reads as a suspense story, which happens to be true, where "true" stands for "critically appraised."

Truth is not a necessary ingredient for entertainment; a certain amount of internal consistency is. One could imagine public support a theory (or a political candidate) on the false equivalence stemming from the sentiment evoked by good entertainment, a sense of poetry, a sense of mystery, the immensity of the starring phenomena, and a granting of trust.

The cast of the book's characters includes free will, volition attributed to a system that one can predict only imperfectly; Everett's many worlds, which ferry animate and inanimate observers along deterministic timelines; particles that do not really exist, in a space that is an emergent (pixelated?) at best; the initially modest entropy; and time, which can only be recovered from the readings of a clock hidden on each page of an indubitably real manuscript scattered all over the floor.

The surprise chapter 8, in the dialogue form, is a fantastic interlude, bound to be imitated, even by the classics.

"Talking to Strangers" by Malcolm Gladwell (2019)

The audiobook version is, on balance, a success. The narrator's---the author's---voice is pleasant and lively enough (at least at 1.25x). The voice actors do not act out episodes from a 2000s TV show. The occasional musical accompaniment (are these ambulance sirens on repeat?), ever so slightly audible but audible enough to niggle, fade into background when drowned in traffic noise of right proportions.

While not denying individual agency, the book invites the reader to critically assess the game before blindly blaming the player. Misfits is the norm. Conformism is the fiction marketed to bind audiences to mediocre TV. Virtue signalling through conformism is not worthy and is not worth the damage it inflicts on the society by muffling the critical discourse and dehumanising fellow travellers.

The suspension of disbelief---trust---is responsible for the success of modern societies. Allowing oneself to be occasionally deceived is a fair price for the majority of individuals to pay for this success. The residual minority are paid to be skeptical.